Faces blurred and distorted. They liquefied into something unnerving. Buildings and traffic blended into a miasma of textured smudge. The sun, vicious with haze and quivering reflections, pressed down on the city and streaked patterns of illuminated symbols of red and yellow and green. There were bodies everywhere. Cars horns rang out tone deaf. Brakes screeched above the hum of engines.
The scene was a dizzying chisel to the skull of man desperate to block out the world and pull focus on his horror in the masses. It was there, within it all, he kept seeing her.
Stathis Edison fumbled through the chaos of the day, blinded by the overload that worked to disorient him. Pale as a demented new sickness. His hands wet. His lungs jerked his tense body with the jab of every bottomed out breath. Behind him, a little apartment ruined with blood, a squad car with broken windows and two broken necks, a tinny voice unanswered over the radio. Against each of his hurried steps the weight of the stolen standard issue pistol swung heavy in the deep pocket of his trenchcoat. His knuckles bled glass. The ruined bones of his left hand swelled his fingers around a platinum band.
Pain could not distract Stathis Edison. Not any longer.
A noise beat into his head. An assault. A violent attack penetrated minuscule cracks in his skull, shot around the interior cavity like a rusted ball bearing… there was a man at the store… and always a woman there, too… and like clockwork, there were children on the sidewalk outside, little brats who mocked him… the neighborhood made him weak and sick just so it could bloom… for thirty years… for thirty years… thirty years it seethed… thirty years in a world of constant strangers, and strange laughter, and hurtful whispers.
Background noise swished brain matter into incomprehensible sludge. He cried. He panicked. He vomited without losing momentum, even when he lost coordination.
He saw her. Again. At the red light. His wife.
The heat swirled activity into something busy and random. Sweat sizzled on wet bodies that meshed together into an orgy. He sidestepped into the street. His drenched feet slipped inside his shoes. He darted left and right, into any opening wide enough for fast steps. His shoulders arched backward with every figure battered. He bled and stumbled. He grunted.
He tripped. His knee crashed into the split sidewalk. Busted within the joint. Spitting out a blunt cry, he rolled to his side and clutched his bent leg in interlocked, bloodied and swollen fingers. He sobbed. There were cracked bones in his left wrist. There was blood that darkened his hairline above his ears. There was sweat that stung inflamed scratches across his forehead. His wet clothes tangled and stunk with anguish.
This is Stathis Edison, curled up in the broad daylight of the busy street. The sudden realization of reality hit him harder than any of his throbbing injuries. It flashed through his mind at once how far he had fallen with a cacophonous ache of remembrances and cries. Into an echo, everything else fell silent. He retreated into his rambling mind, into the tragedy of his actions. Nothing could ever matter to him again, not after what he had done.
With the sound of sirens faint through his awareness, he watched the faces glance with pity and repulsion. What madness accomplished through him, what horror left on the world through his hands and his teeth… it was humiliating.
Then he saw her again. Turned to the crowds of the sidewalk. And gone. He pulled himself to his feet. He stumbled and shouted. Of course, he cried.
He limped. He used buildings and people to carry forward, but was never fast enough to keep up, never sure-footed enough to maintain direction. “My wife,” he screamed with a broken heart. He shoved people out of his way, women and children. “My wife. My wife!”
She appeared, a fleeting glimpse. Spurring him once more. It was enough. Her delicate skin revealed as the breeze bent around a corner. Jet-black hair fluttered about her face. Her green eyes held the moment to burn upon his.
Sirens loud. Panic gripped the block. He held the pistol in his mangled hand and fired into the backs of those blocking his passage.
He spun around and his bones crackled. But she was gone. He collapsed. He pulled forward with the might of his fingers and he ripped nails against the porous concrete. Desperate to move forward, the strength in his arms gave out. His head dropped forward. He spit broken teeth into the cracks of the sidewalk.
“My wife,” he gurgled as he lost consciousness… his clenched fist flung her from the bed to the floor. He could never tolerate her eyes on him. What would she see? What would she think? In spite of her affection, his confidence suffered. She was pregnant. He was enraged. The screams and the anger suffered no lull until the golden glow of morning found the apartment draped in silence and blood. He rolled to his back. His muscles undulated. His ribs twitched. There was a burn in his chest as his flesh tore slowly apart. Stretched thin. His heart pounded. He screamed. He contorted his jaw and strained the ligaments in his neck… Those days in college. He hid away in the books he never focused on. He kept to the back of lecture halls, and to the back booths of the all-night coffee shops the fashionable students frequented after the bars along the strip had shut down. If only he had a better body, a stronger chest, and muscular arms. If only he could wear the same clothes as the other guys. He wasn’t like the others physically. He wasn’t like the others academically. He didn’t belong. But there she was, a beautiful girl. Smiling. Anyway. His body seized. His chest ripped a gory hole from the inside out. A splash of blood and meat exploded to the pavement. His damp viscera fell down upon him as a heavy growth gurgled from the gaping wound. His eyes opened, torn back into the daylight. Slow as the dark trickle that drained from his gash and off his body and crawled towards the curb beside him… Stathis Edison. Awkward child. Horrified of humiliation. Stilted by it even as constant as it had been in his life. Stathis Edison. Nervous of crowds, of schools, of staying the same. In bed at night, he would trace the thought of loving someone beautiful and of being loved in return. But each morning all of his hope would die. Again. And again. He would brush his rotted teeth. He would run water through his wiry hair. He would often lose himself in his reflection. Such a deformed little boy. The lonely walk to school was never more horrible than on the days when his eyes found something disturbing on his face that he hadn’t previously noticed.
His weak hand titled the tip of the pistol to his head. He pulled the trigger. Stathis Edison died with the whisper of one word on his torn lips.
